Brother DCP-J562DW review

The DCP-J562dw is the entry level in Brother’s new range of inkjet multifunction peripherals (MFPs), which the company says is its most compact A4 lineup yet. There’s not much that’s entry level about its headline specification, which includes automatic duplex (double-sided) printing, wireless networking and a colour touchscreen. Dig a little deeper, however, and you’ll notice unpromising ISO print speeds of just 5.6ppm in mono, and 2.7ppm in colour.

I suspect Brother might have tinkered with a couple of things other than this printer’s size: it seems quieter than I remember from previous models. It’s rarely intrusive, even when chucking out draft quality text. Unfortunately it’s business as usual when it comes to its clattery, flexible and unpleasant feeling paper tray, which is fairly typical of the Brother inkjets I’ve reviewed. Here you can keep a 20-sheet stock of photo paper above the main 100-sheet tray, but you have to engage it manually via a recalcitrant latch. At the rear there’s a straight, single-page feed for special media.

This printer’s touchscreen is by no means the slickest – for example, it doesn’t respond to swipe gestures – but it’s still reasonably intuitive and responsive. I particularly like the ability to create shortcuts to frequently used features. Brother’s PC print interface is one of the easiest to use, and its scan interface is also straightforward, if a lacking in advanced features.

The DCP-J562dw has quite a quick scanner, needing just nine seconds to despatch a 150 dots per inch A4 scan, and 18 seconds to scan a photo at 600dpi. Its printer was leagues ahead of its quoted mono print speed, although at 10.7 pages per minute (ppm) on our text test it still wasn’t fast. Switching to draft quality upped the speed to 14.5ppm, but the output was faint.

At just 2.5ppm, colour printing was every bit as slow as expected, while at the highest print quality, photos were laughably so – during our 10×8″ photo test I had to look into the paper output to make sure there wasn’t an undetected paper jam. The test – two photos with borders on two A4 pages – took more than 23 minutes. Printing six borderless 6×4″ prints took more than 80 minutes.

I wouldn’t mind the slow printing if the end results were more impressive, but all-round the quality was simply adequate. On plain paper, black text was OK, but colour prints were lacking in saturation. The scanner produced similarly dull results, with the added problem that it didn’t preserve detail in the darkest areas of our originals – in our grey test, the darkest six shades were indistinguishable.

The DCP-J562dw recovers some dignity with reasonable running costs. Even with its Wi-Fi interface enabled I couldn’t measure any power use once it had entered sleep mode, and I saw a peak during photocopying of just 16W. Using Brother’s 550-page LC223 range of inks, costs work out at 7p per page of text and graphics, which is competitive if not class leading. Overall, however, this MFP is far outclassed by Canon’s PIXMA MG6650. The latter costs a bit less to buy and about the same to run: it’s prettier, prints a little faster, and produces much better results.